The outpouring of love, respect and admiration for Wes Craven from colleagues and fans has been so heartening for our family. He would have loved to know how deeply he touched so many. Kind words have been written this week with many wonderful retrospectives of his career and his impact on the film world. I wanted to give you a sense of the man I knew.

I met Wes 13 years ago when I was a wary 12 year old shaking hands with the man my mother had met months earlier on the only blind date of her life. He was present for many of the big moments in my life: my first day of high school, my first job (here on the Vineyard), college graduation, my first job in the movies (as a PA on Scream 4), dropping out of graduate school and deciding to pursue film as a career. He has been in my life longer than he hasn’t. To me he is not the “Master of Horror,” but a kind, generous, smart and complicated man. His patience and openness with me was extraordinary. To be a stepfather is no easy task, but he handled it beautifully and with a gentleness that belies the films he is known for.

Our relationship took time to grow, but he never stopped trying to connect with me. In those early days, I hovered in the background and gave him few chances to know me. My mother was the voluble glue that held us together. Our shared love for her brought us to our love for each other.

We often laughed about the first time my mother left us to have dinner alone together while she went to the movies with friends. We sat, for some unknown reason, at our formal dining table surrounded by eight empty chairs and long silences. Soon we found a way to make the silences shorter.

I spent many years mostly away from home, first at boarding school in Connecticut and then at university in Scotland. Many evenings were punctuated with long phone calls home of which Wes would hear only my mother’s side. He saw her sitting for long silent stretches and thought that I was garrulously filling her in on the day’s events, along with my thoughts and observations. In truth, I was often sitting in companionable silence in a damp Scottish flat. He saw a challenge here.

Whenever I called and my mother wasn’t home, he would keep me on the phone and power through the silences with goofy questions or a detailed recounting of what the cats had been up to lately. Sometimes, even when my mother was home, he would answer and tell me tales of his trips to Shirley’s Hardware, trying to draw me out rather than immediately handing the phone over to my mother so I could ask her to send me some American candy. Some of the conversations went on so long, regaling me with a self-deprecating account of his attempts to pilot our little boat in Vineyard Sound, that I began groaning internally, knowing how much homework I still had to do. A land-lubber he surely was.

Soon, though, I began to look forward to our phone calls and even more to our time at home in West Tisbury together. Silences became companionable and not awkward. We had grown comfortable. We were family.

Wes faced illness with a characteristic fortitude. He saw the world for what it was: often scary, peopled by things that will hurt you, but full of beauty and grace. His films put fear in the foreground and made it strength. Many things go bump in the night, but with strength and ingenuity you can conquer them. Though he terrified us with Freddy and Ghostface, he also buoyed us with Nancy and Sidney. Life is both horror and wonder. He taught us to fear, to laugh and to fight.

Wes was a man who experienced everything life has to give and much of what it takes away. After a strict Baptist upbringing, he found his own way — a search which led in many directions thanks to his lifelong curiosity. He didn’t see his first real movie until he’d reached his early twenties, but they became a guiding force in his life and brought him onto the screens — and into the nightmares — of countless people around the world.

He gave me more than I could ever thank him for. He showed me how to work in this business and remain decent and fair. He taught me the value of a strong partner and of a happy marriage. He brought me to Martha’s Vineyard. He gave me the confidence to believe in my own ideas. He gave me Jonathan and Rachel, Jessica and Mike, Miles, Max and Myra-Jean. He gave me all this and more, but he saved his greatest gift for last. He showed me how to love. In this last year my heart has grown three sizes because of him. Life comes with a lot of noise and distractions, but the two things that matter are time and love. In our time together, I found love that I will carry with me always.

He died knowing something we all hope for: he was loved deeply.

Nina Tarnawsky lives in Los Angeles and West Tisbury.